"Pity The Billionaire": Thomas Frank on the "Unlikely Comeback of the Right" Ahead of Iowa Caucus

Best-selling author and Harper’s magazine columnist Thomas Frank argues that as President Barack Obama fails to provide a coherent, progressive economic alternative, the Right has staged an unlikely comeback — despite the ongoing fallout from the 2008 financial crisis for which its trademark polices were largely responsible. Frank’s new book is called, “Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right.” “[Conservatives after 2008] didn’t take the pundit’s advice — they didn’t move to the center, they didn’t moderate themselves. They did the opposite,” Frank says. “They purged their moderate wings, moved dramatically to the right with the Tea Party movement and enjoyed this incredible success in the 2010 election.” Frank says whether the conservatives will succeed in 2012 is still “anyone’s guess,” and says Obama should “start getting some of the rhetoric of the Occupy movement in there. He needs to start talking about the 1 percent. He needs to start talking about what has happened and why over the last 30 years.” We also speak with The Nation correspondent John Nichols about the Occupy movement in Iowa.